1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to Fibre Channel infrastructures and, more particularly, to link service commands for Fibre Channel infrastructures.
2. Description of the Related Art
A Storage Area Network (SAN) is a high speed communication network or a subnetwork for transferring data between a server and a storage system. A SAN establishes coupling between a server and a storage device through a dedicated Fiber Channel (FC) switch via a connection relationship. The SAN isolates a storage device from the server, such that more than one server can share the storage device without use of a dedicated intermediate server. SAN storage devices are made up of one or more disk devices, generally referred to as a disk array, for storing computer data and have interfaces that are, among other things, Fiber Channel (FC) compatible.
FC interfaces communicate according to FC protocol standards, which govern how signals are transmitted over various transmission media including fiber optic cable or twisted pair copper cables, for example. In some configurations, FC interfaces further communicate according to Fibre Channel over the Ethernet (FCoE) protocol standards, which encapsulates Fibre Channel (FC) frames in Ethernet frames to allow an Ethernet network to communicate with low latency, high performance networks, such as Fibre Channel.